C S Lewis Exhibition: Words & Worlds

There is a new C S Lewis exhibition at The Old Library, Magadelen College, Oxford, until 11 September 2024. Words & Worlds 'examines his Oxford life as teacher, scholar, writer, administrator and broadcaster, and his extensive involvement in various societies, including the Socratic Club and the Inklings.' The exhibition includes 'original manuscripts, books, letters, illustrations, audio recordings and photographs' and 'personal objects, including Lewis’s pipe, tobacco jar and pen.' It is open on Wednesday afternoons from 2pm to 4.30pm and entrance is free, though the College itself charges an entrance fee to some visitors. An exhibition catalogue is planned.

Surely there is a tale to be written about the talismanic properties of C S Lewis' tobacco jar . . .

Design: Toucan Tango

The Centenary of F. M. Mayor's 'The Rector's Daughter' - A Guest Post by John Howard

There are novels which, from the opening sentence, immediately draw in the reader, starting them on a journey. Sometimes this can be a rather solitary expedition, while in other cases the reading traveller finds themselves in the company of someone who, by the end, has possibly become somewhat less of a stranger. The traveller may have learned something too. One such novel is The Rector’s Daughter by F.M. Mayor, first published in May one hundred years ago by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press. Although Flora Macdonald Mayor (1872-1932) published several other books, including a volume of ghost stories, today she is almost certainly only remembered for this one novel.

‘Dedmayne is an insignificant village in the Eastern counties.’ The first two chapters of The Rector’s Daughter are an intense Impressionist portrait painted with economy and poise. The reader is introduced to Dedmayne and its society (or lack of it). We see the Rector himself, Canon Jocelyn, who has been in charge of the parish for forty-three years and at eighty-two still cuts a ‘thin, stately figure’. The Rector is a literary man, scholar and author, expert in classical and theological subjects: when not undertaking his few liturgical and pastoral duties, he keeps to his study. His intellect and cool objectivity make him a figure of some authority for the clerical colleagues and young curates who seek his counsel.

The Rector’s daughter is Mary, who at thirty-five has remained at home with her father, a widower. She cares for Ruth, her ‘imbecile’ sister. The two Jocelyn sons have long since married and moved away. Over the years the Rector has become distant from Mary: ‘he became occupied with St Augustine, and had no leisure for her’ (10). She now occupies a role in a world of duties and responsibilities, both at home and in the parish and village: ordered and reasonably secure, but at times confining and stifling. ‘Such was Mary’s life. […] Sometimes she felt the neighbourhood, the village, even her father, becoming like shadows. On the whole she was happy. She did not question the destiny life brought her. People spoke pityingly of her, but she did not feel she required pity’ (17).

Into this life of quiet desperation comes Robert Herbert, the clergyman son of Canon Jocelyn’s closest friend, who is appointed to a nearby village. Friends and servants speculate on the possibilities. Mary realises that her life could be about to change: she ‘felt less solitary; she knew not why’ (28). The two are attracted to each other: each seems to be able to supply something currently missing in their lives. ‘They were silent; soon they were again opening their hearts to one another’ (79). They understand each other, but neither can ever quite say what they feel, so strong are the codes of custom and reticence they cannot bring themselves to breach. Herbert goes to stay with a friend at Buxton, and – predictably – falls in love with the much younger Kathy Hollings. They become engaged. Back at the Rectory, Mary wanders into the old Nursery, which she would not now have the opportunity to restore to use. ‘It seemed a room of the dead. […] I may go on fifty years’ (88). 

A year later, the Herberts’ marriage falls under strain as Herbert’s infatuation with Kathy has worn off and he realises their basic incompatibility. Mrs Herbert retreats to the French Riviera with her hedonistic friends. When Mary meets him again and they finally acknowledge what they mean to each other, there is nothing to be done. In her misery Mary translates a poem whose final lines she renders as: ‘For thee I am outcast from God, / I have forfeited Heaven for thee’ (129). Neither Mary nor her father are able to take the steps that would most help the other: they have grown too far apart. Yet after the Rector’s death, when Mary is forced to move to Croydon to live with her aunt, in the crudely-built ‘red-villa road’ she achieves a sort of freedom, as ‘her natural tenderness found many outlets’ (208).

As an aside, it is intriguing to speculate on when The Rector’s Daughter is set. At first it seems most likely to be contemporary, as Cubism and Metroland are mentioned and the forays into artistic London life and the Riviera fast set evoke the period; yet it is as if the Great War has never happened. It is not spoken of and has had no discernible effect. There is, rather, a late Victorian or Edwardian sensibility throughout, especially evident in the chapters set in the eastern county, which have a greater depth of reality than those which take place elsewhere. F.M. Mayor’s England seems a stolid and serene one for its time, its ancient institutions and rural counties at least only overlayed by as much change as the railways brought. 

Perhaps the key is Mary Jocelyn herself. The confusion and turbulence of change, the collision of overlapping outlooks and worlds, is summarised and symbolised in and through her. The novel is titled for her – although only in terms of relationship and position. She exemplifies the inherent conflict between duty and freedom, friendship and renunciation, providing insight through her developing self-knowledge and the self-examinations which grow increasingly intimate and rejecting of illusion. Nevertheless, as Rosamond Lehmann commented: ‘[Mary] is herself an individual, to an extraordinary degree. At the same time she becomes, to me at least, a kind of symbol or touchstone for feminine dignity, intelligence and truthfulness.’ 

(John Howard)

Radio Ghosts of the Mid Twentieth Century

In the period from about 1930 to about 1960 many people in Britain had a radio but few had a TV. The radio was therefore the main form of home entertainment, alongside the gramophone. The BBC was the only radio broadcaster in the country and thus a major sponsor of the arts. But most of the broadcasts in this period are lost: it was too expensive to record them permanently and, once they had been aired, it was rare for them to be archived.

This means that for an entire art form, the radio play, and for experimental features such as sound collages, we do not have many early examples in existence. To get some idea of what they were like, we have to rely on scripts (these do not always exist either), publication in books (not many made it to this form) and reviews (often brief and general).

The same is true of music, where not only the performance but sometimes the composition itself is lost: and particularly in the case of incidental music for plays. Talks and readings are more likely to have survived, as their authors often collected these in book form. The Radio Times and The Listener, the two radio newsstand journals, did provide detailed listings and some commentary week by week, and some BBC paperwork also survives, giving insights into the commissioning and development of pieces. Even so, most radio productions from this period are only known as ghostly echoes.

Using the resources that are available, a dedicated researcher can try to build up a picture of what we have lost and what survives, and that is just what Roger Simpson has done in his study of Arthurian programmes, Radio Camelot: Arthurian Legends on the BBC, 1922-2005 (2007). Inevitably, this can be at times a little dry, reading simply as a catalogue or checklist, but the author works imaginatively with the sources to convey more colour and detail where possible. There are a handful of stalwart Arthurian works which recur throughout his survey, deployed in various forms by the BBC, eg Malory, Tennyson, Wagner, Eliot, and indeed one criticism that could fairly be made is that the broadcaster too often played safe and served up variations on established classics, rather than commissioning new work.

On the other hand, the BBC was occasionally adventurous, for example in sponsoring interpretations of David Jones’ difficult modernist long poems with Arthurian themes, which seemed to have made a real impact on listeners. They also adapted some of T H White’s popular Arthurian fiction such as The Sword in the Stone. They did not, however, use any of Arthur Machen’s Arthurian pieces, whether his Grail fiction or his essays, nor did they do anything with Charles Williams’ Grail thriller War in Heaven, but they did broadcast in 1957 The Summer Stars: A Masque by Robin Milford, a musical tribute to his Arthurian poem In the Region of the Summer Stars. The Robin Milford Trust lists this as his Op. 102 and dates it 1946-57, but there does not seem to be any recording. Work was often taken up through the personal championing of individual BBC employees, as with David Jones’ narrative poems.

As we get into the later 20^th century and early 21^st century, more work is preserved, and the book provides a useful guide to Arthurian history and literature in the air during this period. For example, Simpson mentions a contribution to a 2003 programme by Prof Charles Thomas, the noted Cornish archaeologist, who warmly recommends two novels often overlooked: Castle Dor by Daphne du Maurier, completing a novel by Arthur Quiller-Couch (1962): and Dawn in Lyonesse (1938) by Mary Ellen Chase. This is set at the King Arthur Hotel, Tintagel, and replays the Tristan legends among Cornish fisher folk.

Radio Camelot illustrates what can still be achieved with patience and ingenuity to retrieve at least some knowledge of lost radio productions, and it would be interesting to see a similar survey for fantastic literature more generally, or for some sub-set of it, such as ghost stories.   Early on, of course, Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was the obvious choice for any ghostly theme, and there were also folklore and ancient customs talks, but perhaps surprisingly M R James was not then greatly in evidence. Algernon Blackwood, however, became a household name as an established ghost story raconteur on the radio, known familiarly as ‘the Ghost Man’.

I have encountered by chance descriptions of a couple of interesting productions: Horton Giddy’s ghost story Off Finisterre (1936) and the fantastical Candlemas Night by Ernest Randolph Reynolds (1955). I think it is likely that, as with Arthurian productions, there were other high quality and distinctive fantastical or ghost story dramas or audio collages during the 1930-60 period that are awaiting rediscovery, even if we only have faint echoes of what they were.

(Mark Valentine)

Lost Estates - a new short story collection

Swan River Press have just announced pre-orders for my new short story collection Lost Estates and Other Stories. This collects twelve tales, four of them previously unpublished, with several others now only available in this volume. In all the stories, scholarly, bookish or bohemian characters encounter the uncanny or otherworldly,

The new stories depict a book-collector who follows a sign to Brazen Serpent Books; the secret of a lost pamphlet and the man who sang ‘The Laughing Policeman’; a scholar of inn signs who finds some have escaped into the English landscape; and the reunion of The Perpetual Motion Machine Company.

Two long stories, first published by Sarob, evoke antiquarian mysteries: a manor held on condition of playing a king at chess (but which king?), and the secret of King John’s treasure, which may not be quite what it seems. 

The remaining stories, mostly out of print, first appeared in anthologies and journals. They explore the patterns seen in the sands of a great estuary; an eerie street game in Paris; the secret lore of a quiet cul-de-sac; the strange volumes received at the ancient Chaplain's Library; and an episode in the youth of Arthur Machen, involving the figure of General Gordon and the byways of London.  

Lost Estates and Other Stories is in a signed, limited, hardback edition of 450 copies, the first 100 of which are embossed and hand-numbered. Cover art by Jason Zerrillo; jacket design by Meggan Kehrli.

(Mark Valentine)